The reality of rough sleeping in the City of London

In 2008 London Mayor Boris Johnson set a target to eradicate rough sleeping in the capital by the end of 2012.

With a year to go to meet that objective, what progress has been made on the street?

On a chilly December night, BBC London joined outreach worker Tom Mulrenan, 32, from homeless charity Broadway.

The No Second Night Out (NSNO) scheme, launched in nine London boroughs in April, has meant that if outreach teams find someone new to the streets, they are given the chance to be taken to an assessment hub.

There they will be offered an alternative to sleeping out for a second night.

We took to the City of London - also known as the Square Mile - by foot to track down rough sleepers who had been reported to NSNO by police that day.

There were only two new cases on the list, but we followed a route tracing some of the more common resting spots for the City's rough sleepers, first heading to a derelict office block near Aldgate station.

Boxes and rags

Police had reported seeing a woman in her late 30s earlier that day.

We crept along a dark path running around the edge of the building until we spotted a pile of cardboard boxes and rags.

The No Second Night Out scheme was launched in nine London boroughs in April

No rough sleepers were to be found, but an empty bottle of heroin substitute methadone suggested someone might have been there recently.

Another Broadway worker would check the area again later that night.

As we walked along The Minories, a man approached us asking for spare change.

"Jonas, is that you?" Tom asked.

Armed with a serious drugs problem, Jonas, 29, was rough sleeping in the Square Mile when Tom met him a year ago.

They devised a plan to get him into accommodation, "but then he disappeared", said Tom.

Jonas would not be eligible for NSNO as he claimed to be staying with a friend.

But as an Eastern European living in Britain since he was 15, he could be eligible for a hostel if he had a benefits claim in place.

Tom arranged an appointment for him to make that claim the following day.